Of course I mean satisfying in the sense that it is more consistent with the rest of my experience. So I think I am a little more sophisticated than you seem to give me credit for. That said, at this stage of my life, at least, I do think the basic thrust of your post that I may be biased towards what I want to be true may be valid, and this is always deeply troubling to me. However, you (and part of me) may be equally biased towards the idea that life is absurd. Since both statements are so vague and so emotionally charged, I think it is very difficult to talk about them with the same amount of objectivity we talk about, say, quantum mechanics, which of course will still involve some bias incidentally. Maybe the statements are supposed to reflect in part some subjective nature of our experience so that we can never talk about them without a large amount of bias. We are still compelled to wrestle with them, and ultimately believe our conclusions all the same, and I think the process is a good one.
I think that I agree with you that my argument must be circular in some fundamental way. However, we can learn things from circular thinking. Mathematics is full of circular definitions, although I confess I can't think of a good simple one right now. And all of modern science has an element of circular thinking in it: to be able to observe the electron of our physics theories, we must believe that we understand the measuring apparatus with those same physics theories. Now, I don't believe my statement that evolution is a creative act of God is as certain as the electron. I think the existence of the electron is far too grounded in experience for that. However, I do think my statement could be the same type (except for the intelligence of its advocate) as Maxwell's conviction that the electromagnetic field lines are real, or Einstein's conviction that the intillegibility of the universe will allow us to find a fundamental equation of nature, or the common belief among physicists that quantum mechanics genuinely shows that the world is not deterministic as Newton had supposed. I am not trying to prove the existence of God. I am simply trying to understand known scientific theories in a way that is consistent with the rest of my life experience. Part of that experience is the deep conviction that human beings each have intrinsic worth in this world. I hope that this means human beings do not simply appear to me to have such value, but actually do.
So. In all of the billions of galaxies and trillions of stars there's one god who created one and only one intelligent species inhabiting one single insignificant speck?
My own suspicion is that there must be life on other planets. And I think that if they exist, they ARE important in the universe. You and I are only two human beings among 6 billion currently living, and many more (12 billion total?) that have ever lived, but I believe we are both important all the same. If the universe is infinitely large and the probability of intelligent life is finite, which is quite possible, then there may be an infinite number of intelligent beings, but that does not need to make us seem any less important, especially if we understand our existence as the product of an infinitely loving creator.
The sad and simple truth is that you have to take it on faith that "this must have happened" to truly make the evolution theory work. That's fine, and that's ok... but it's not scientifically sound.
I think that all modern science, and probably all science through history as well, has to make assumptions for the sort "this must have happened." Science has an element of circular thinking in it. Evolutionary theory is nothing special in that regard.
Let me add that if you EVER hear the laws of thermodynamics used to justify anything more complicated than "you can't heat up a this piece of thing to 100 F with a piece of thing thats 99 F", but not so complicated that you don't need a PhD in science or engineering to really understand what the conclusion is saying, it is most probably a wrong conclusion. That has been my experience, anyway:-) (Maybe that should be the 4th law of thermodynamics...)
I think you and I agree on the facts (and both trust biologists that their latest iteration of natural selection is more or less correct), but I disagree with you, most days of the week, in your interpretation of them. First, let me distinguish between what I will call (correctly?) the theory of natural selection and the Evolution of the Species. The former, being a scientific model, is quite well understood and is what is seemingly programmed into Avida. You summed it up nicely with your 4 steps. Evolution of the Species is a physical process that took place over billions of years and resulted in concrete individual animals, among them human beings. I think we can probably agree that the Evolution of the Species in general, and the evolution of human beings in particular, is contingent. You seem to conclude this means that our existence is incredibly accidental. It seems to me to be more satisfying to see the evolution of human beings not as contingent and accidental but as a contingent and purposeful miracle, ie as the creative act of God. I think that my conclusion is more consistent with my own optimism that human beings are important in the universe. I suppose that I also believe that the entire Evolution of the Species, inconceivable as it is, ought to be comprehensible, and the only way I can imagine the entire process to be comprehensible is for it also to be purposeful because I believe natural selection does make the whole history seem so very contingent.
Most of the quantum mechanics that I know, at least, treats, eg, electrons as point particles with an uncertain position. However, thinking about this more, I have decided: 1) it is kind of a loaded question, since we can be talking about either the physical electron, which I don't think anybody is exactly sure how to define, or the mathematical electron, which no one is sure is actually real and in any case can be different in different mathematical models, and 2) I confess, I need to go back and look at what the typical quantum field theory (which I know only in bits and pieces) interpretation is on all this.
Another problem is that at least some of the dark matter needs to "clump" together, and there is no way to imagine neutrinos clumping. Or so the astronomers and astrophysicists tell me. Incidentally, fundamental particles of matter, like electrons and neutrinos, aren't thought to take up space, exactly.
I guess that I'm just comparing Christianity to Judaism. Sex certainly appears all over the place in the Old Testament. All the important figures of the Old Testament that I can think of, including the most important one, Moses, are married. The Old Testament has the entire book on sex. And finally, Jewish rabbis are expected to marry. (I don't know what Jewish priests did, I think they married too.)
Compare this to the New Testament, to Jesus in particular. When asked about cellibacy, Jesus replies something like "Let those who can, do." (Which I always think is funny to think of as reading "If some crazy people want to do that, fine with me, I guess...";-), but of course I don't think he meant it that way.) Jesus himself wasn't married of course. Similarly, I think the apostles are not usually depicted as having wives, although it looks like what the Bible actually says on this seems to be somewhat controversial: http://www.tfp.org/TFPForum/catholic_perspective/w iles_guiles.htm . In any case, the mere fact that the greatest figures of the Old Testament are married, while the greatest figure of the New Testament is not, means that the New Testament does not give the same ringing endorsement of sex that the Old Testament does.
I reference Augustine because he is generally acknowledged as being a huge influence on the Catholic Church (the biggest after Paul, I think), especially its attitude towards sex. See, for example, the first few paragraphs of this link: http://www.jknirp.com/aug3.htm.(I just found it, the whole thing is quite an interesting read, actually.) But consider the simple fact that priests are celibate. As I understand history, this was done to keep priests from having heirs, not because sex was considered wrong, but all the same, compare this to Judaism, in which rabbis are supposed to get married because marriage is considered a virtue.
I don't place my trust in theologians, I place it in the Bible.
I probably should have made it more clear that I was talking about historical Christianity. The Christianity that I believe in doesn't hold sex to be wrong. However, I still argue that the fact that Jesus didn't have sex means that my own religion will never be able to be as comfortable with sex as, eg, Judaism. If we are all supposed to be as Christ-like as possible, and Christ didn't have sex, I don't see how there won't always be some sort of tension there with Christians having sex.
"Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it?" No, he could always eat the burrito, no matter how hot. He would just suffer while eating it. Horribly. For all our sakes. (And of course, since a Jewish man prepared the burrito, we Christians would hold the Jewish people guilty of this for the rest of time, or at least for a millenium or two...)
Christianity doesn't hate sex, it celebrates it. It just confines it to marriage.
Of course, the historical Christianity that I have read about has done anything but celebrate sexuality. In general, Christianity has a tradition of considering chastity as being better than marriage. Augustine had rather negative views on sexuality, and this more or less persisted throughout the rest of Latin Christianity's history (I don't know about the Greek Church), until very recently. If Christianity really celebrated sexuality, the Biblical Jesus would have had a wife and a family, like Moses. (Or vice versa, if you prefer.)
I agree what you say is partially true. However, I think that sex, in men at least, is somehow linked to violence as surely as it is linked to some urge for reproduction or intimacy. Rape of course is about power, not sexual attraction in the way that normal people have sexual attraction. And certain motifs in porn play on male dominance, and sometimes even anger, and on the objectification of women in a way that makes me very uncomfortable. So maybe my thinking is spoiled due to sort of cultural Christian prejudice on sexuality, but I don't think that that, eg, alcohol is a valid analogy to porn because ourselves as sexual beings seem to be connected to ourselves as violent beings in a way that our desire for mood altering substances is not.
It is interesting to me that your argument strikes me as having strange parallels with Catholicism. Just replace "porn" with "forgiveness of Jesus Christ and the administration of the Eucharist by the Church", and this would be probably be in line with an orthodox description of the Catholic Church. Of course, the Church has a different conclusion about pornography, but I am guessing you have a different conclusion about the Church. This isn't a criticism, just an observation.
The reeks of a delibratly skewed statistic.
Thats a very good point. However, I don't think the article is trying to say that pornography is bad because children watch it, and this in some Pat-Robertson-sense corrupts them. Rather, it is saying that pornography is fundamentally changing people's conception of sexuality because they first are learning about sex through pornography. The survey supports that, because I would naively think that 18 and 19 year olds are still developing their sexuality, just as 9 year olds are. Now, while the article is fairly silent on whether pornography is morally wrong, it does conclude that viewing porn is at least empty and lonely, and probably tragic, but it does this in the context of adults viewing pornography, not children. Of course, I grant you that the people who did the survey may have been trying to do what you describe.
From the article, and the summary of the article, Cablevision argues nothing will be recorded on its network unless the viewer orders it from the remote control. So unless I misunderstand what you are saying, you will still have to explicity record shows. However, I would guess that you could in principle record as many simultaneously as you wanted to? Whether the companies would actually let you do this is another issue entirely, though.
First let me say that if this is something controversial enough that it might go to the supreme court, there is no way I am not going to be capable of arguing convincingly that it is unconstitutional. I am just suggesting that in my layman's opinion based on this wikipedia article, there appear to be important differences.
1) The Florida Supreme Court ruled this was an illegal search. So the sort of activity in FL vs Riley would seem to be almost be an illegal search, even though it wasn't. This tells me we need to look at the SCOTUS decision carefully.
2) The wiki article states: The Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Florida Supreme Court with a four-vote plurality, arguing that the accused did not have a reasonable expectation that the greenhouse was protected from aerial view. So this search was legal because Riley did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy that was violated by the police helicopter. So then we have to ask: why was his reasonable expectation of privace not violated?
3) Wiki now quotes the supreme court decision as Any member of the public could legally have been flying over Riley's property in a helicopter at the altitude of 400 feet and could have observed Riley's greenhouse. The police officer did no more. So I (naively) take this to mean that if other people could not have also flown over his greenhouse and observed his marijuana, then his privacy would have been violated.
4) However, the SCOTUS seems to place an even stronger requirement for the search to be legal. Again, wiki quotes them as: As far as this record reveals, no intimate details connected with the use of the home or curtilage were observed, and there was no undue noise, no wind, no dust, or threat of injury. In these circumstances, there was no violation of the Fourth Amendment. So if the search had also observed 'intimate details connected with the use of the home" (whatever that means, exactly), then seeming it would have been illegal.
5) So I claim first that because a spy plane with a powerful camera on it may very well violate the standard set in (3). In particular, if the sort of technology required for such a camera is very expensive and as a practical matter only available to law enforcement. So this would mean that if I am in my greenhouse, and a spyplane takes a picture of my face, this has violated my reasonable expectation of privacy because there is no way that an ordinary citizen could have observed the same things that the spy plane observed. Perhaps my reasonable expectation of privace would have been violated even if only the marijuana had been seen, but from an altitude too high for a normal citizen to have seen it from a plane (ie, space). The possiblity of this seems to be supported by O'Conner's dissent, which wiki quotes as stating: [I]t is not conclusive to observe, as the plurality does, that "[a]ny member of the public could legally have been flying over Riley's property in a helicopter at the altitude of 400 feet and could have observed Riley's greenhouse." Nor is it conclusive that police helicopters may often fly at 400 feet. If the public rarely, if ever, travels overhead at such altitudes, the observation cannot be said to be from a vantage point generally used by the public and Riley cannot be said to have "knowingly expose[d]" his greenhouse to public view.
6) Further, I claim that even if a spyplane or satelite doesn't violate (3), it would still be very limited by the standard in (4) so that the blanket statement that a warrant is not needed to observe property from the air is too vague to be completely true.
So I guess that the difference is just a matter of degree, but to me, it looks like degree is everything.
Reading the wikipedia entry, it is far from clear to me (who is not a lawyer, btw) that these sorts of drones would be constitutional based on this ruling. The entry says:
Any member of the public could legally have been flying over Riley's property in a helicopter at the altitude of 400 feet and could have observed Riley's greenhouse. The police officer did no more.
The entry also notes that the police officer observed the marijuana with his naked eyes, and makes reference to reasonable expectation of privacy. So at least superficially, this seems to me to be quite different than, eg, a drone with a powerful telescopic lense on it to observer people's faces, as many posts here seem to imply might want to be done with these drones. (Obviously, certain applications would not require this.)
I think you make a lot of good points. I just want to add a few observations from one who has studied physics, but frankly knows relatively little about chemical and biological systems. While the hydrogen atom can be solved exactly, there is no such thing as even an isolated hydrogen atom. There will always be small perturbations so that you don't even know exactly how to even write the Schrodinger equation, let alone solve it. It is not at all clear to me, at least, that it is even possible (perhaps even in principle?) to approximate these perturbations in a way that allows you to simulate biological systems in a satisfactory, non ad-hoc way. But I think the problem gets even worse. We know that the Schrodinger equation is not completely correct in that it applies only to particles going much slower than the speed of light. Who knows in what other ways it may not be right, what other unconscious assumptions we are making. Are the assumptions important to the function of biological systems in a manner that we don'ty understand yet? It seems to me, a priori, there is no way to know. My own personal prejudice is that it seems likely, if theories as zany as quantum mechanics and Einstein's theories of relativity can be true for very large, very small, and very fast systems. So anyway, I agree with you that it seems to me like trying to simulate these biological systems from first principles is extremely ambitious.
Religion holds that some questions are not to be asked...Science holds that all questions are permissible, and any answers that empirical investigation and theoretical utility support are permissible, and that we are allowed to discard any prior answer to such questions when sufficient evidence accumulates against them.
I agree with you that science and religion are fundamentally different in that science the ultimate authority is reason and experience (in some complicated mix), while in religion it is at least partly in particular living or dead human beings. I think your characterization of it misses some interesting details, though. Of course its difficult to decide what is "religion" and what is not, but when I think of religion, I think of a discipline that is asks more questions than any other. Religious thinkers think about the beginning and end of the world. They think about moral questions. They think about law. Finally, they think about metaphysics, including whether there is God. Western theology has put a lot of effort into trying to profe that faith is also rational, which I think implies thinking about whether God exists. I know theologians and philosophers spent a lot of time on proofs of God's existence. Now, certain institutions of religion might demand that your conclusion be that God exists, but the definition of God may be very broad, and in any case I personally would classify even the judgement that God does not exist to be a religious one.
Science questions, on the other hand, are much more restricted. Science more or less allows only questions about how natural phenomenon relate to other natural phenomenon. There are no scientific papers published on either the possible existence of God, or even on the ethics of scientific applications (although scientists are human beings, and certainly may be concerned with these things.) I do agree with you that science is in a sense able to efficiently discard prior answers in a way that religion does not. On the other hand, religious orthodoxy most certainly does change with time, and really good physics theories at least(eg, Newton's physics) always stay relevant because we are often able to understand the new theories only in the language of the old ones.
Even the role of the existence of God in science is more complicated than your characterization. While God has no explicit place in a scientific theory, we can still consider whether the idea of God motivates scientists, and I think it does. I don't know how many scientists believe in a personal God, but I think science is permeated by faith in a rational world. For Einstein, at least, this was the same as believing in something close to Spinoza's pantheistic (but not personal) God. I think this is more or less what motivated his quest for a single, unifying equation of nature, which is now a major project of the entire physics community. So I understand this as a kind of faith in God, although I don't think this is the language most physicists would use of course.
Well... duh! Any religion worth its salt lets you eat its God. If Jesus didn't let us all take a nibble, do you think Christianity would still be around.:-) (sorry, that was probably a little overboard...)
I think that your sentiment is very natural, and part of me feels the same way. On the other hand, examing assumptions that cannot ultimately be justified is not necessarily futile. For example, I think the general view nowadays is that mathematics is probably ultimately tautological (I'll probably get yelled at by a lot of mathematicians for saying this...). However, I'm guessing you would probably agree that thinking about mathematics is somehow a worthy endeavor all the same. Similarly, I would say even if there is no God, scrutinizing religion is worthy as well. For example, historically natural science probably owes a lot to Christian theology. Certainly a lot of scientists have found creative inspiration for their theories in ideas that are much more similar to religious beliefs than scientific judgements. I personally think it all has intrinsic value as well.
No, the spaghetti monster is, by definition, the most perfect bowl of spaghetti that can exist. Since any spaghetti created by some other being is less perfect than one not created by another being, by definition the flying spaghetti monster must NOT have been created by God, but is a perfect being in and of itself, its existence dependent on nothing else.;-) (I think I got that argument right...)
This is absolutely true, and yet, jargon makes it not entirely true. A photon in a vacuum has no mass. However, when light is in matter, it is not entirely clear what the mathematical "photon" corresponds to physically. Mathematically, theorists will give photons in matter mass, and talk about them having what amounts to an effective mass inside the matter, due to interaction with the matter. It is, uh, confusing to say the least:-)
Obscenity is and should always be defined by the community -- preferably by the household.
I think I agree with this, but my question (as a layman I should add, since I am not a lawyer) is: who gets to define the community and the household? I guess that traditionally these have been fairly easy to define geographically. Telecommunication forces us to reexamine what exactly constitutes a community, and this presents a headache I guess we will all be dealing with for the rest of our lives.
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Of course I mean satisfying in the sense that it is more consistent with the rest of my experience. So I think I am a little more sophisticated than you seem to give me credit for. That said, at this stage of my life, at least, I do think the basic thrust of your post that I may be biased towards what I want to be true may be valid, and this is always deeply troubling to me. However, you (and part of me) may be equally biased towards the idea that life is absurd. Since both statements are so vague and so emotionally charged, I think it is very difficult to talk about them with the same amount of objectivity we talk about, say, quantum mechanics, which of course will still involve some bias incidentally. Maybe the statements are supposed to reflect in part some subjective nature of our experience so that we can never talk about them without a large amount of bias. We are still compelled to wrestle with them, and ultimately believe our conclusions all the same, and I think the process is a good one.
I think that I agree with you that my argument must be circular in some fundamental way. However, we can learn things from circular thinking. Mathematics is full of circular definitions, although I confess I can't think of a good simple one right now. And all of modern science has an element of circular thinking in it: to be able to observe the electron of our physics theories, we must believe that we understand the measuring apparatus with those same physics theories. Now, I don't believe my statement that evolution is a creative act of God is as certain as the electron. I think the existence of the electron is far too grounded in experience for that. However, I do think my statement could be the same type (except for the intelligence of its advocate) as Maxwell's conviction that the electromagnetic field lines are real, or Einstein's conviction that the intillegibility of the universe will allow us to find a fundamental equation of nature, or the common belief among physicists that quantum mechanics genuinely shows that the world is not deterministic as Newton had supposed. I am not trying to prove the existence of God. I am simply trying to understand known scientific theories in a way that is consistent with the rest of my life experience. Part of that experience is the deep conviction that human beings each have intrinsic worth in this world. I hope that this means human beings do not simply appear to me to have such value, but actually do.
So. In all of the billions of galaxies and trillions of stars there's one god who created one and only one intelligent species inhabiting one single insignificant speck?
My own suspicion is that there must be life on other planets. And I think that if they exist, they ARE important in the universe. You and I are only two human beings among 6 billion currently living, and many more (12 billion total?) that have ever lived, but I believe we are both important all the same. If the universe is infinitely large and the probability of intelligent life is finite, which is quite possible, then there may be an infinite number of intelligent beings, but that does not need to make us seem any less important, especially if we understand our existence as the product of an infinitely loving creator.
The sad and simple truth is that you have to take it on faith that "this must have happened" to truly make the evolution theory work. That's fine, and that's ok... but it's not scientifically sound.
I think that all modern science, and probably all science through history as well, has to make assumptions for the sort "this must have happened." Science has an element of circular thinking in it. Evolutionary theory is nothing special in that regard.
Let me add that if you EVER hear the laws of thermodynamics used to justify anything more complicated than "you can't heat up a this piece of thing to 100 F with a piece of thing thats 99 F", but not so complicated that you don't need a PhD in science or engineering to really understand what the conclusion is saying, it is most probably a wrong conclusion. That has been my experience, anyway :-) (Maybe that should be the 4th law of thermodynamics...)
I think you and I agree on the facts (and both trust biologists that their latest iteration of natural selection is more or less correct), but I disagree with you, most days of the week, in your interpretation of them. First, let me distinguish between what I will call (correctly?) the theory of natural selection and the Evolution of the Species. The former, being a scientific model, is quite well understood and is what is seemingly programmed into Avida. You summed it up nicely with your 4 steps. Evolution of the Species is a physical process that took place over billions of years and resulted in concrete individual animals, among them human beings. I think we can probably agree that the Evolution of the Species in general, and the evolution of human beings in particular, is contingent. You seem to conclude this means that our existence is incredibly accidental. It seems to me to be more satisfying to see the evolution of human beings not as contingent and accidental but as a contingent and purposeful miracle, ie as the creative act of God. I think that my conclusion is more consistent with my own optimism that human beings are important in the universe. I suppose that I also believe that the entire Evolution of the Species, inconceivable as it is, ought to be comprehensible, and the only way I can imagine the entire process to be comprehensible is for it also to be purposeful because I believe natural selection does make the whole history seem so very contingent.
Most of the quantum mechanics that I know, at least, treats, eg, electrons as point particles with an uncertain position. However, thinking about this more, I have decided: 1) it is kind of a loaded question, since we can be talking about either the physical electron, which I don't think anybody is exactly sure how to define, or the mathematical electron, which no one is sure is actually real and in any case can be different in different mathematical models, and 2) I confess, I need to go back and look at what the typical quantum field theory (which I know only in bits and pieces) interpretation is on all this.
What examples are you thinking of where they aren't treated as point particles?
Another problem is that at least some of the dark matter needs to "clump" together, and there is no way to imagine neutrinos clumping. Or so the astronomers and astrophysicists tell me. Incidentally, fundamental particles of matter, like electrons and neutrinos, aren't thought to take up space, exactly.
I guess that I'm just comparing Christianity to Judaism. Sex certainly appears all over the place in the Old Testament. All the important figures of the Old Testament that I can think of, including the most important one, Moses, are married. The Old Testament has the entire book on sex. And finally, Jewish rabbis are expected to marry. (I don't know what Jewish priests did, I think they married too.)
;-), but of course I don't think he meant it that way.) Jesus himself wasn't married of course. Similarly, I think the apostles are not usually depicted as having wives, although it looks like what the Bible actually says on this seems to be somewhat controversial: http://www.tfp.org/TFPForum/catholic_perspective/w iles_guiles.htm . In any case, the mere fact that the greatest figures of the Old Testament are married, while the greatest figure of the New Testament is not, means that the New Testament does not give the same ringing endorsement of sex that the Old Testament does.
.(I just found it, the whole thing is quite an interesting read, actually.) But consider the simple fact that priests are celibate. As I understand history, this was done to keep priests from having heirs, not because sex was considered wrong, but all the same, compare this to Judaism, in which rabbis are supposed to get married because marriage is considered a virtue.
Compare this to the New Testament, to Jesus in particular. When asked about cellibacy, Jesus replies something like "Let those who can, do." (Which I always think is funny to think of as reading "If some crazy people want to do that, fine with me, I guess..."
I reference Augustine because he is generally acknowledged as being a huge influence on the Catholic Church (the biggest after Paul, I think), especially its attitude towards sex. See, for example, the first few paragraphs of this link: http://www.jknirp.com/aug3.htm
I don't place my trust in theologians, I place it in the Bible.
I probably should have made it more clear that I was talking about historical Christianity. The Christianity that I believe in doesn't hold sex to be wrong. However, I still argue that the fact that Jesus didn't have sex means that my own religion will never be able to be as comfortable with sex as, eg, Judaism. If we are all supposed to be as Christ-like as possible, and Christ didn't have sex, I don't see how there won't always be some sort of tension there with Christians having sex.
"Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it?"
No, he could always eat the burrito, no matter how hot. He would just suffer while eating it. Horribly. For all our sakes. (And of course, since a Jewish man prepared the burrito, we Christians would hold the Jewish people guilty of this for the rest of time, or at least for a millenium or two...)
Christianity doesn't hate sex, it celebrates it. It just confines it to marriage.
Of course, the historical Christianity that I have read about has done anything but celebrate sexuality. In general, Christianity has a tradition of considering chastity as being better than marriage. Augustine had rather negative views on sexuality, and this more or less persisted throughout the rest of Latin Christianity's history (I don't know about the Greek Church), until very recently. If Christianity really celebrated sexuality, the Biblical Jesus would have had a wife and a family, like Moses. (Or vice versa, if you prefer.)
I agree what you say is partially true. However, I think that sex, in men at least, is somehow linked to violence as surely as it is linked to some urge for reproduction or intimacy. Rape of course is about power, not sexual attraction in the way that normal people have sexual attraction. And certain motifs in porn play on male dominance, and sometimes even anger, and on the objectification of women in a way that makes me very uncomfortable. So maybe my thinking is spoiled due to sort of cultural Christian prejudice on sexuality, but I don't think that that, eg, alcohol is a valid analogy to porn because ourselves as sexual beings seem to be connected to ourselves as violent beings in a way that our desire for mood altering substances is not.
It is interesting to me that your argument strikes me as having strange parallels with Catholicism. Just replace "porn" with "forgiveness of Jesus Christ and the administration of the Eucharist by the Church", and this would be probably be in line with an orthodox description of the Catholic Church. Of course, the Church has a different conclusion about pornography, but I am guessing you have a different conclusion about the Church. This isn't a criticism, just an observation.
The reeks of a delibratly skewed statistic.
Thats a very good point. However, I don't think the article is trying to say that pornography is bad because children watch it, and this in some Pat-Robertson-sense corrupts them. Rather, it is saying that pornography is fundamentally changing people's conception of sexuality because they first are learning about sex through pornography. The survey supports that, because I would naively think that 18 and 19 year olds are still developing their sexuality, just as 9 year olds are. Now, while the article is fairly silent on whether pornography is morally wrong, it does conclude that viewing porn is at least empty and lonely, and probably tragic, but it does this in the context of adults viewing pornography, not children. Of course, I grant you that the people who did the survey may have been trying to do what you describe.
From the article, and the summary of the article, Cablevision argues nothing will be recorded on its network unless the viewer orders it from the remote control. So unless I misunderstand what you are saying, you will still have to explicity record shows. However, I would guess that you could in principle record as many simultaneously as you wanted to? Whether the companies would actually let you do this is another issue entirely, though.
First let me say that if this is something controversial enough that it might go to the supreme court, there is no way I am not going to be capable of arguing convincingly that it is unconstitutional. I am just suggesting that in my layman's opinion based on this wikipedia article, there appear to be important differences.
1) The Florida Supreme Court ruled this was an illegal search. So the sort of activity in FL vs Riley would seem to be almost be an illegal search, even though it wasn't. This tells me we need to look at the SCOTUS decision carefully.
2) The wiki article states: The Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Florida Supreme Court with a four-vote plurality, arguing that the accused did not have a reasonable expectation that the greenhouse was protected from aerial view. So this search was legal because Riley did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy that was violated by the police helicopter. So then we have to ask: why was his reasonable expectation of privace not violated?
3) Wiki now quotes the supreme court decision as Any member of the public could legally have been flying over Riley's property in a helicopter at the altitude of 400 feet and could have observed Riley's greenhouse. The police officer did no more. So I (naively) take this to mean that if other people could not have also flown over his greenhouse and observed his marijuana, then his privacy would have been violated.
4) However, the SCOTUS seems to place an even stronger requirement for the search to be legal. Again, wiki quotes them as: As far as this record reveals, no intimate details connected with the use of the home or curtilage were observed, and there was no undue noise, no wind, no dust, or threat of injury. In these circumstances, there was no violation of the Fourth Amendment. So if the search had also observed 'intimate details connected with the use of the home" (whatever that means, exactly), then seeming it would have been illegal.
5) So I claim first that because a spy plane with a powerful camera on it may very well violate the standard set in (3). In particular, if the sort of technology required for such a camera is very expensive and as a practical matter only available to law enforcement. So this would mean that if I am in my greenhouse, and a spyplane takes a picture of my face, this has violated my reasonable expectation of privacy because there is no way that an ordinary citizen could have observed the same things that the spy plane observed. Perhaps my reasonable expectation of privace would have been violated even if only the marijuana had been seen, but from an altitude too high for a normal citizen to have seen it from a plane (ie, space). The possiblity of this seems to be supported by O'Conner's dissent, which wiki quotes as stating: [I]t is not conclusive to observe, as the plurality does, that "[a]ny member of the public could legally have been flying over Riley's property in a helicopter at the altitude of 400 feet and could have observed Riley's greenhouse." Nor is it conclusive that police helicopters may often fly at 400 feet. If the public rarely, if ever, travels overhead at such altitudes, the observation cannot be said to be from a vantage point generally used by the public and Riley cannot be said to have "knowingly expose[d]" his greenhouse to public view.
6) Further, I claim that even if a spyplane or satelite doesn't violate (3), it would still be very limited by the standard in (4) so that the blanket statement that a warrant is not needed to observe property from the air is too vague to be completely true.
So I guess that the difference is just a matter of degree, but to me, it looks like degree is everything.
Reading the wikipedia entry, it is far from clear to me (who is not a lawyer, btw) that these sorts of drones would be constitutional based on this ruling. The entry says:
Any member of the public could legally have been flying over Riley's property in a helicopter at the altitude of 400 feet and could have observed Riley's greenhouse. The police officer did no more.
The entry also notes that the police officer observed the marijuana with his naked eyes, and makes reference to reasonable expectation of privacy. So at least superficially, this seems to me to be quite different than, eg, a drone with a powerful telescopic lense on it to observer people's faces, as many posts here seem to imply might want to be done with these drones. (Obviously, certain applications would not require this.)
I think you make a lot of good points. I just want to add a few observations from one who has studied physics, but frankly knows relatively little about chemical and biological systems. While the hydrogen atom can be solved exactly, there is no such thing as even an isolated hydrogen atom. There will always be small perturbations so that you don't even know exactly how to even write the Schrodinger equation, let alone solve it. It is not at all clear to me, at least, that it is even possible (perhaps even in principle?) to approximate these perturbations in a way that allows you to simulate biological systems in a satisfactory, non ad-hoc way. But I think the problem gets even worse. We know that the Schrodinger equation is not completely correct in that it applies only to particles going much slower than the speed of light. Who knows in what other ways it may not be right, what other unconscious assumptions we are making. Are the assumptions important to the function of biological systems in a manner that we don'ty understand yet? It seems to me, a priori, there is no way to know. My own personal prejudice is that it seems likely, if theories as zany as quantum mechanics and Einstein's theories of relativity can be true for very large, very small, and very fast systems. So anyway, I agree with you that it seems to me like trying to simulate these biological systems from first principles is extremely ambitious.
Religion holds that some questions are not to be asked...Science holds that all questions are permissible, and any answers that empirical investigation and theoretical utility support are permissible, and that we are allowed to discard any prior answer to such questions when sufficient evidence accumulates against them.
I agree with you that science and religion are fundamentally different in that science the ultimate authority is reason and experience (in some complicated mix), while in religion it is at least partly in particular living or dead human beings. I think your characterization of it misses some interesting details, though. Of course its difficult to decide what is "religion" and what is not, but when I think of religion, I think of a discipline that is asks more questions than any other. Religious thinkers think about the beginning and end of the world. They think about moral questions. They think about law. Finally, they think about metaphysics, including whether there is God. Western theology has put a lot of effort into trying to profe that faith is also rational, which I think implies thinking about whether God exists. I know theologians and philosophers spent a lot of time on proofs of God's existence. Now, certain institutions of religion might demand that your conclusion be that God exists, but the definition of God may be very broad, and in any case I personally would classify even the judgement that God does not exist to be a religious one.
Science questions, on the other hand, are much more restricted. Science more or less allows only questions about how natural phenomenon relate to other natural phenomenon. There are no scientific papers published on either the possible existence of God, or even on the ethics of scientific applications (although scientists are human beings, and certainly may be concerned with these things.) I do agree with you that science is in a sense able to efficiently discard prior answers in a way that religion does not. On the other hand, religious orthodoxy most certainly does change with time, and really good physics theories at least(eg, Newton's physics) always stay relevant because we are often able to understand the new theories only in the language of the old ones.
Even the role of the existence of God in science is more complicated than your characterization. While God has no explicit place in a scientific theory, we can still consider whether the idea of God motivates scientists, and I think it does. I don't know how many scientists believe in a personal God, but I think science is permeated by faith in a rational world. For Einstein, at least, this was the same as believing in something close to Spinoza's pantheistic (but not personal) God. I think this is more or less what motivated his quest for a single, unifying equation of nature, which is now a major project of the entire physics community. So I understand this as a kind of faith in God, although I don't think this is the language most physicists would use of course.
Well... duh! Any religion worth its salt lets you eat its God. If Jesus didn't let us all take a nibble, do you think Christianity would still be around. :-) (sorry, that was probably a little overboard...)
I think that your sentiment is very natural, and part of me feels the same way. On the other hand, examing assumptions that cannot ultimately be justified is not necessarily futile. For example, I think the general view nowadays is that mathematics is probably ultimately tautological (I'll probably get yelled at by a lot of mathematicians for saying this...). However, I'm guessing you would probably agree that thinking about mathematics is somehow a worthy endeavor all the same. Similarly, I would say even if there is no God, scrutinizing religion is worthy as well. For example, historically natural science probably owes a lot to Christian theology. Certainly a lot of scientists have found creative inspiration for their theories in ideas that are much more similar to religious beliefs than scientific judgements. I personally think it all has intrinsic value as well.
No, the spaghetti monster is, by definition, the most perfect bowl of spaghetti that can exist. Since any spaghetti created by some other being is less perfect than one not created by another being, by definition the flying spaghetti monster must NOT have been created by God, but is a perfect being in and of itself, its existence dependent on nothing else. ;-) (I think I got that argument right...)
This is absolutely true, and yet, jargon makes it not entirely true. A photon in a vacuum has no mass. However, when light is in matter, it is not entirely clear what the mathematical "photon" corresponds to physically. Mathematically, theorists will give photons in matter mass, and talk about them having what amounts to an effective mass inside the matter, due to interaction with the matter. It is, uh, confusing to say the least :-)
Obscenity is and should always be defined by the community -- preferably by the household.
I think I agree with this, but my question (as a layman I should add, since I am not a lawyer) is: who gets to define the community and the household? I guess that traditionally these have been fairly easy to define geographically. Telecommunication forces us to reexamine what exactly constitutes a community, and this presents a headache I guess we will all be dealing with for the rest of our lives.